A Traditional Contractor Specialises and Grows

Winthrop is a leading engineering company that is headquartered in Ireland and delivers quality projects throughout Europe. They have a turnover of €600m and about 750 employees.

Winthrop’s core business has grown from being a traditional mechanical and electrical contractor across the data, commercial, pharmaceutical, and industrial sectors, which has naturally developed into specialising in mission critical projects and turnkey data centre solutions that are delivered faster, leaner and smarter.

The company is currently constructing €1b of data centre mission critical projects across Europe, equating to approximately 300 MW of IT load.

Before

• Key project communications handled over long email chains
• Lack of transparent audit trails
• Lacked real-time, secured data, backed up regularly

After

• Visibility for all required stakeholders and vendors
• Localised digital review and approval processes
• Smoother 3D modelling collaboration
• Transparent approval trail for auditing
• Secure sharing of information with client and vendors

Challenge

As the lead contractor on projects for design and build, Winthrop manages the majority of vendors involved with projects, as well as the design team collaboration. Winthrop previously stored documents internally on the system server, and shared them via email to individuals or as hard copy transmittals.

Maintaining project communication across dispersed teams was complex and often took place over long email chains. Communicating information over email caused documents to be outdated quickly, and left all parties open to vulnerabilities in cybersecurity.

Solution

After looking for a common data environment, Winthrop selected Viewpoint For Projects (VFP) to provide a collaborative platform to manage and share information with vendors and clients. “The notification feature allows for real time updates and efficient collaboration across large project teams,” said PJ Healy, Winthrop’s document controller.

Implementing robust approval workflows in VFP meant processes became centralised, providing vital transparency on real-time progress and overall project tracking. In addition, new security permissions prevented sensitive documents from being seen by users that did not have permission to view them. The company no longer faced the risk of emails with private documents being sent to the wrong recipients.

Data Security Goes Digital

“The Viewpoint platform makes document sharing easy,” Healy said. “The permissions functionality gives us total control meaning people can only see real-time documentation that is relevant to them.”

All construction documents were circulated and reviewed via VFP, with security permissions applied, meaning no more hard copies had to be printed out and distributed—another potentially serious data breach.

Coordinating teams became easier, as the self-serve nature of VFP allowed vendor inputs for 3D modeling to be updated when required and the wider team could see all submitted updates prior to meetings.

Results

The collaboration features and streamlined workflows available in Viewpoint For Projects helped Winthrop meet key milestones and deadlines. The automated routing on workflows saved Winthrop hundreds of labor hours that would have otherwise been spent distributing information and updating documents.

A centralised platform in VFP helped Winthrop manage and schedule works and materials more strategically.

Viewpoint For Projects has helped scores of contractors like Winthrop centralise documents, collaborate in real time and improve data security. See how cloud technology can save your projects time and money.